Multi-Sensor Data Collection, Fusion, and Analytics to Support Effective Performance Measures in Construction Projects

尽管关于建筑生产率是否在下降仍存在争论，但有一点是一致的，那就是改善的空间很大。想一想经常重复的一句话：“你不能改进你没有衡量的东西。”因此，提供有效的建筑生产率措施变得至关重要，并已被确定为在未来2至10年内实现建筑效率和竞争力突破性提高的五大机遇之一。本研究的目的是探讨集成来自视频、声音、温度和其他物联网(IoT)传感器的多传感器数据的可行性，以便于测量建筑工地的施工作业生产率。拟开展的研究工作主要包括三个步骤。它首先设计了一个便携式多传感器硬件平台，可以很容易地部署来监控现场施工操作。然后进行数据融合和分析，从监测数据中提取施工作业信息。进一步探索检索到的信息以发现现场的真实施工操作过程并对其进行建模。这样，可以以系统的方式测量和分析施工作业在过程中的生产率，所需的时间、成本和精力更少。预计这项研究将帮助承建商和/或分包商更经常地(例如按小时或每天)评估他们的工作效率，以便能够迅速发现和纠正在建项目的生产率问题。研究工作的成效将在加拿大魁北克省的实际建设项目中进行评估。

Although there is still a debate on whether construction productivity is declining or not, one note of agreement is that the room for improvement is significant. Consider an often-repeated phrase that “You can't improve what you don't measure.” Therefore, providing the effective measures of construction productivity becomes essential and has been identified as one of five opportunities for breakthrough improvements in construction efficiency and competitiveness in the next 2 to 10 years. The objective of this research is to investigate the feasibility of integrating multi-sensory data from video, acoustic, thermal, and other Internet of Things (IoT) sensors to facilitate the measures of construction operation productivity on a construction site. The proposed research work includes three main steps. It starts with the design of a portable multi-sensor hardware platform that could be easily deployed to monitor onsite construction operations. Then, the data fusion and analysis are conducted to retrieve construction operation information from the monitoring data. The retrieved information is further explored to discover and model real construction operation processes on the site. This way, the productivity of the construction operations in the processes could be measured and analyzed in a systematic way with less time, cost, and efforts required. The research is expected to help contractors and/or subcontractors evaluate the efficiency of their work more often (e.g. on an hourly or daily basis), so that the productivity problems on active construction projects could be detected and corrected quickly. The effectiveness of the research work will be evaluated in real construction projects in Quebec, Canada.